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Big Government Media: CRA For News Organizations?
...Can you say Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) for news organizations? How much do you want to bet newspapers are going to have to meet specific hiring guidelines based strictly on race and gender quotas?

Who has time for trivialities like merit when there’s political correctness to be suffered?

The editorial and executive boards of publicly supported “news” outlets will be chosen by the public in the form of local ‘citizen news and information committees’.

Anyone want to guess who will control these local committees, and thus be empowered to grade the merger worthiness of news organizations? If you guess anything other than community organizations, you only get your news from the New York Times.

Under this scenario, the Federal government would necessarily lay down a smothering blanket of regulation on the world of publishing, defining and thus restricting the “how” and the “what” of news reporting, journalism, and editorial opinion making.

The government will have to do these things in order to define their new working relationship with the publicly controlled-supported entities. Or is the Federal government going to spend our tax dollars on failed businesses without a peep of legislation on the matter? That wouldn’t be very progressive.

Consider for a moment, the combination of whatever legislation they are brewing up in the meeting linked above, and McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to envision a future where the government holds tremendous sway over defining what is “political speech”, who may engage in political speech, how they may engage in it, and when.

Will you need a registered license to engage in “political speech” during election cycles? What is an election cycle when you are engaged in a “permanent campaign?”...